Realities of war don’t always hit home

Lawrence M. Hinman

Almost every year, I teach a segment of one of my courses on just war theory, a venerable tradition that attempts to bring some vestiges of human decency into the hell of war. International restrictions on such things as nerve gas and torture are part of this tradition, and just war theory comprises a nexus of issues about which military leaders are deeply concerned and to the scholarly discussion of which military officers regularly contribute.

When I discussed these issues with my students this fall, I mentioned that they have grown up in a country that has been at war since there were in sixth grade. They give me puzzled looks – more so than usual – and asked what I meant. Sure, they said, they knew there were wars going on, but it didn’t feel like we were at war.

In many ways, they are right. The American public does not anxiously await reports from the front. Indeed, the very concept of “a front” is arcane. Nor do my students remember when Congress declared war. After all, that was a couple of years before I was born! Despite the Constitution, we don’t declare war anymore. Nor, of course, do we have peace treaties. Our armed conflicts – the Vietnam War was, if I recall correctly, a “police action” – do not end in victory or defeat, they tend just to dribble off inconclusively after a massive expenditure of dollars and too many lives.

If my students no longer feel that they are in a country at war, it is not an accident. One of the lessons that politicians learned during the Vietnam War was that American citizens begin to take military operations seriously when Americans are killed and wounded in combat. During the first Gulf War, which actually did have objectives and ended decisively, our leaders learned to hide the body bags and caskets, keeping the graphic reminders of the death toll off the evening news.

The next generation of leaders has done even better. Clearly a draft is unthinkable. To have a draft for a war, you would need the consent of the governed. They would notice that we were at war, that they were paying a price in terms of lives and limbs rather than just dollars. So we narrowed the noticeable footprint of the war on the American public.

One way of doing this was to concentrate much of the burden of warfare on the shoulders of active-duty military and the reserves, bringing them back for one tour of duty after another, no matter what the consequences were for these valiant men and women. A second way of doing this was to outsource the war, especially to civilian contractors who, particularly in the wake of 9/11, received far more money than their counterparts in uniform. And we outsourced some of this to the CIA, traditionally an intelligence-gathering body that has taken on an increasingly combative role while at the same time escaping the oversight traditionally reserved for the military.

All of this cost a tremendous amount of money. It has been estimated by some researchers at more than $3 trillion. But my students wouldn’t know. Even those who watch the presidential debates don’t hear anything about the cost of war. Only the cost of health care.

Now we have yet one more way to reduce the footprint of war on the American people: the drone. War is now being waged by remote control. “Aviators” in bunkers outside Las Vegas – already an unreal location – are piloting drones over Afghanistan and Pakistan. This has given rise to a new kind of killing – one in which the worst thing the enemy can do to you is to make the screen go blank. This development is but the latest stage in a trend that began with long-range artillery through high-altitude bombing to cruise missiles and now to the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper.

Of course, as the president has pointed out, there is no need to request congressional approval for these missions, since they do not involve human beings. Thus the footprint of war shrinks, even in Congress.

War requires the consent of the governed. The latest move toward a vastly increased use of military drones is but the latest chapter in a long series of moves that undermine the need for the consent of the governed and replace it by the fiat of the chief executive.